Hacker News Reader

Comment by moolcool | Hacker News Reader

Touchscreens have ruined car UX for a generation.

It's not just cars. Other places I've seen this is large home appliances, with recent examples being inwall ovens and washer/dryer.

On the oven front, the high end GE ones[0] have a display. It looks fine from pictures, but when you're trying to interact with it, it's just slow. It has a design flaw of just an unresponsive touch screen. But buttons you want easy access to aren't always there. (This can maybe get better if they fixed the implementation, but right now it's terrible).

On the washer dryer front, I've been using two recently so I could compare. One is an old Maytag with a physical dial. The other is a semi new Samsung that has buttons but uses a display. With the Samsung, you always have to push and hold the power on off button. The Maytag you can just turn the dial and then hit start. The Maytag is just overall faster to interact with.

I feel like these large appliance makers see displays as a selling point, but then they produce very suboptimal implementations that are terrible and the downgrade from the previous experience. I really wish they would spend more time on UX, rather than style.

[0] https://www.geappliances.com/appliance/GE-Profile-30-Smart-B...

totally agree. In our previous apartment we had an oven with a touch screen and a stove with touch controls (no screen). They were our least favorite items at home. In a kitchen setting especially, it's very hard to operate touch interfaces.

Making a good touchscreen UI—-from both a hardware responsiveness and UX perspective is very expensive.

I’d rather GE make an oven that reliably holds temp and leave touchscreens to the Apples of the world.

If that horse has left the barn, never to return, then what if they at least build on top of android?

It is such a bad implementation.

Whenever I am in a car with a touch screen the two things that get me

- The car bounces and I miss the thing on the screen I was aiming for

- I am low vision I have to lean in so close to read those stupid screens with the tiny UI widgets

I hope they figure something better out, I honestly preferred when they were doing the screens with the buttons around the edge.

First, car companies are generally terrible at making software from the jump. The interfaces are always byzantine, laggy, and poorly laid out. There's the small bandaid of Apple Carplay and Android Auto, but then your vehicle settings are decoupled from the rest of the UI, which is confusing and frustrating. I'm honestly due to get a new car, but I have no idea what to get because virtually every car on the market feels like using a 10 year old Android tablet.

All I want is a small display, doesn't have to be touch, for backup camera and carplay. Please put everything else behind buttons, switches, and LED indicators.

It's not exactly what you're looking for, but maybe test drive a car with Android Automotive (Google's built-in infotainment product). I have it in my Volvo XC40 EV and like it. But at least in my car there are still physical controls for audio playback and a few other things (not climate).

There is a list of cars with Android Automotive at the bottom of its Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Automotive

Unless they have switched recently, the Toyota Camry has a great combination of screen and physical buttons.

https://di-uploads-pod3.dealerinspire.com/toyotaofclermont/u...

My F-150 2013 is exactly that. Anything since 2013 is a touch screen for everything as opposed to a small display screen with physical buttons for everything.

You might just need to find an older used model that is in good condition.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com